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Joe Pyfer vs. Kelvin Gastelum has received a new date.
The middleweight clash was originally scheduled to go down in Mexico City on March 29. Unfortunately, the fight was a last-minute scratch after Pyfer became ill. Little more than a week later, we now know that their fight has been rescheduled for UFC 316 on June 7 when the promotion heads back to the Prudential Center in Newark.
Pyfer’s head coach, John Marquez, broke the news during an appearance on MMA Today.
Joe Pyfer is never going back to mexico
Pyfer ultimately blamed Mexico for his withdrawal from their previously scheduled scrap, blaming the “sh*t-hole” country for getting him sick with food poisoning.
“I don’t care if it’s offensive to you, I will never go back to that country,” Pyfer said on his Instagram stories. “I did everything right: I slept in a tent, I did all this work to still get sick.
“Some people are saying it wasn’t the food, that I got altitude sickness. I’m not a f*cking geographic f*cking elevation f*cking scientists, but I was told as long as I acclimated — which I did for two months, slept in a tent on the f*cking floor — I did everything I could to prepare. And if that’s what altitude and elevation is, f*ck that country. I will never fight there again. Shit hole. Not going back.”
For what it’s worth, Marquez claimed that Pyfer lost 12 pounds during his sickness.
Gastelum is coming off a unanimous decision victory over Daniel Rodriguez last June. The one-time interim title challenger has won two of his last three inside the Octagon, including a win over Chris Curtis in 2023.
Pyfer makes his return to the cage with a solid 4-1 record under the UFC banner, including a vicious 85-second knockout over Marc-André Barriault at UFC 303 last year. Before that, he earned back-to-back first-round KOs over Alen Amedovski and Gerald Meerschaert followed by a submission victory over Abdul Razak Alhassan.
